From graphical display to dynamic model: mathematical geology in the Earth sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract: Graphical displays were used early in geophysics and crystallography, mineral-ogy, petrology and structural geology by the early 1800s, but nineteenth-century geology obstinately remained mainly descriptive. Charles Lyell's quantitative classification of the Tertiary Sub-Era in 1828 was a notable xception. Nevertheless, by 1920 the quantitative approach had become established. W. C. Krumbein, who introduced the computer into geology in 1958, encouraged use of probabilistic sampling a d process-response models. Early work focused on databases, statistical data analysis and display. By the 1970s, sto-chastic simulation, deterministic modelling and spatial 'geostatistics ' (pioneered by Math-eron and his co-workers), were of growing importance. The introduction of the personal computer and the graphical user interface in the 1980s brought well-proven quantitative methods out of the research environment onto the workbench and into the field. Since the mid-1980s, the analysis, display nd modelling of behaviour in three dimensions, under-pinned by spatial statistics, computational fluid-flow, visualization technology, etc., has proved of economic benefit to mining, petroleum geology and hydrogeology. Other, com-putationally intensive, methods likely to be of importance in the Earth sciences are th